Yeah, originally everything was open, we didn't even require a login to upvote/comment/etc. Then some folks from ISIS came on and started trying to muck everything up, so we had to throw a gate on it (banning by IP was just too chaotic). We'll add some more info to the gate soon.

I don't know what you can do on your site, because I didn't want to sign up, but you can look at HN without having to sign up and you still need an account to vote or to comment.

Yes, that will be how it works in the future, but we haven't had time to build out the non-logged-in states of everything. So it's a hacky solution, but we just threw up a wall for now.